With the increasing popularity of the Internet and digital photography, the Internet becomes a platform for millions of users to store, print, and share digital photos via various online photo service providers. Yahoo! Flickr (www.flickr.com) is an example of an online photo service provider. The process typically involves taking photos with a digital camera and uploading the digital photos to the online photo service provider's website. From there, a user may view, print, or share the digital photos with friends and family members. Typically, the user would access the online photo service provider's website using a uniform resource locator (URL) and a unique login and password. The user may then manipulate the digital photos, such as create multiple albums, provide image names, send images to friends and family, and provide shared access to certain images. Alternatively, websites may serve as a general repository, for example as a posting website, and anyone using the correct URL would have access to the images.
After hundreds and thousands photos have been uploaded, the categorization and searching of the photos are typically done manually. For example looking a particular person in a photo is done through visual inspection of all the photos or thumbnails of the photos individually and sequentially. Such conventional approach does not provide an efficient way to assist the user to obtain relevant information from the photos.
Therefore, there is a need to address the issues of the conventional system in handling digital photos. In particular, there is a need for methods and systems for managing, organizing, and searching digital photos.